『Sustainability In Your Ear』のカバーアート

Sustainability In Your Ear

Sustainability In Your Ear

著者： Mitch Ratcliffe
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Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen in to learn and be inspired to give your best to restoring the climate and regenerating nature.Copyright 2025 Internet Media Strategies Inc. マネジメント・リーダーシップ リーダーシップ 地球科学 生物科学 科学 経済学
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  • Ethan and Desmond Hua Build HOPE for School Uniform Reuse

    Ethan and Desmond Hua Build HOPE for School Uniform Reuse
    2026/06/08
    Most school uniforms are retired while they are still perfectly wearable. Children cycle through them on a predictable annual schedule as they grow, which sends a steady stream of usable clothing toward the landfill at the same moment families on tight budgets are paying to replace what their kids have grown out of. The waste side of that equation is substantial: the EPA estimates Americans generated about 17 million tons of textiles in 2018, and roughly 11.3 million tons of it was landfilled. Ethan and Desmond Hua, brothers from San Mateo, California, looked at textile waste and the cost of raising a family and saw a single solvable loop. In 2020, while they were still in middle school, they founded the HOPE Uniforms Program — HOPE stands for Help Our Planet Earth — a student-led nonprofit that collects gently used school uniforms families have outgrown and redistributes them, free, to families who need them. What began in one elementary school, run out of the family garage, now serves about 10 schools across three districts. By the brothers' count, HOPE has kept more than 14,000 uniforms out of landfills, redistributed over 12,000 of them, and served more than 1,400 households, saving those families an estimated $141,000. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Ethan and Desmond discuss why reuse sits a rung above recycling, how two teenagers built a multilingual logistics operation with a live inventory system, and what it took to talk Costco into donating 2,000 new uniforms. Ethan's work has earned him a 2025 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes and a Samaritan House Young Samaritan Award.The environmental case rests on a point that's easy to miss: the highest-value thing you can do with a garment is keep it whole and in use. What makes HOPE worth attention is the operations as much as the intent. The brothers engineered the return step directly into the model: families request uniforms through a website available in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese; the uniforms are returned when kids outgrow them; and Ethan and Desmond spot-check and reissue them. That return loop, paired with a deliberate decision to treat families as repeat customers who deserve a dependable service, is what converts a one-time donation into a repeating cycle. The approach is also honest about scale — a garage operation in San Mateo County will not move the national textile-waste numbers on its own. The brothers' wager is replication; Ethan's dream is HOPE in another garage, and then another, and the model is plain enough for a motivated student in another district to copy. Whether thousands of small local loops can add up to a circular economy is the open question this conversation puts on the table.To find out more about HOPE — and to donate uniforms, request them, or start a program in your own community — visit hopeuniformsprogram.com and follow the program on Instagram, @hopeuniformsprogram. If you know a teen making a difference for the planet, the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes recognizes young changemakers each year. And to find reuse, donation, and recycling options for textiles near you, search the Earth911 recycling directory.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    44 分
  • The Institute of Food Technologists' Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science

    The Institute of Food Technologists' Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science
    2026/06/01
    About a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, but the public conversation about food and climate keeps getting stuck at the two ends of the chain — what farmers grow on one side, what consumers buy on the other. The middle of that chain — processing, packaging, distribution, storage — is where most of the practical climate levers actually live, and it is the part you almost never see. Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), wants us to look there. Brendan spent more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service leading a team of 30-plus scientists developing non-thermal treatments — cold plasma, high-intensity light, irradiation — that kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish without cooking the food. He stepped into the IFT role on December 1, 2025, and joins Sustainability In Your Ear to walk through IFT's new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap covering circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, reusing food waste, precision fermentation, and cellular agriculture.Brendan describes food safety as a three-legged stool — exclusion, containment, and eradication — and notes that in a warming world the first leg is getting harder. Pathogens travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn't used to, with warming oceans already expanding Vibrio bacteria in shellfish that previously didn't carry them. That reframes food safety as climate adaptation work — and it lands at the moment when federal research capacity is being thinned out. The conversation then opens into the ultra-processed food debate, where IFT is pressing the case that nutritional quality, not processing intensity, should define dietary guidance, because pasteurized milk, shelf-stable beans, and a deep-fried snack cake are all "processed," and collapsing them into a single category hobbles the very technologies that extend shelf life and cut food waste. Brendan closes on the structural shift coming next: humans domesticated about 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, but precision fermentation — built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics — opens up trillions of possible microbial community combinations, each able to turn side streams and waste streams into dairy proteins, vitamins, flocculants for water treatment, and food ingredients. Garbage in, gumdrops out, as he puts it. We're not there yet, but the trajectory is clear.To learn more about IFT's work and download the climate white paper, visit ift.org.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    52 分
  • SiYE Interview - Trex Makes Circularity Work

    SiYE Interview - Trex Makes Circularity Work
    2026/05/25
    Less than 2% of Americans can put plastic film in their curbside recycling bin, according to The Recycling Partnership. Meanwhile, the country generates millions of pounds of bags, pallet wrap, bubble mailers, and dry cleaner sleeves every year that machinery at materials recovery facilities is designed to reject. The plastic film problem has been the recycling industry's white whale for three decades — too contaminated for most processors, too light for most economics. But more than 30 years ago, Trex Company, then a small operation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, decided to build its supply chain around exactly this material. By the end of 2024, Trex had upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of waste plastic film into composite decking and had become one of the largest plastic film recyclers in North America. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Amy Fernandez, Chief Legal and Sustainability Officer, and Zachary Lauer, Chief Operations Officer at Trex, discuss how the company designs an entire manufacturing process around feedstock variability, why Trex indexed its 2024 sustainability report to IFRS standards before any US regulator required it, and what has to happen for old Trex decks to become new Trex decks.

    Most manufacturers spend their engineering effort narrowing input tolerances. Trex went the other direction. Zach described thousands of recipes the production lines can run through, swapping between cleaner stretch film one day and heavily contaminated industrial trimmings the next. Artificial intelligence reads each feedstock stream in real time and adjusts extrusion temperatures and line speeds to keep the finished board within specification. In 2024, the company sourced over 1 billion pounds of reclaimed PE film and wood scrap, including 377 million pounds of waste plastic, through a national collection network of more than 10,000 retail drop-off locations and hundreds of school and community partners enrolled in its NexTrex program. The company is also preparing for the first generation of Trex decks, which are reaching replacement age, and its manufacturing lines can reabsorb the company's own boards. The recycling bottleneck is contractors pulling up old decks who don't want to sort screws from boards. Underneath all of it is a point worth lingering on: Trex's poly feedstock isn't priced off a barrel of crude, which means in a period of reshoring, tariff volatility, and oil-market disruption, recycled supply chains are structurally more stable than virgin ones, not less.

    To find out more about Trex and its sustainability work, visit trex.com. The 2024 Sustainability Report is available on the company's investor relations site.
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    50 分
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